Less than a month ago, Georgetown police arrested one David Mao of San Francisco, a city reportedly in California, following a traffic stop on South Dupont Avenue. The officers, it seems, found some 11.5 pounds, yes pounds, of marijuana in the car he was driving.

By any standard, that's a lot of cannabis. By way of comparison, a family size bag of Lay’s classic potato chips weighs a mere 10 ounces, and carrying it in your car won’t get you arrested. Nonetheless, some would say consuming them is a guilty pleasure.

While Mao was charged with the standard “possession with intent to deliver a controlled substance,” news reports did not indicate what specifically the perpetrator intended to do with his weighty package.

Besides the obvious (turning his stash into hash for cash), it’s possible that he was innocently transporting a secret food ingredient meant for distribution to the 30 or so bakeries in Sussex County. Southern Delaware is, after all, the Culinary Coast.

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PETA is responsible for this billboard in Baltimore, timed to coincide with the Baltimore Seafood Festival in September.(Photo: Submitted photo People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals)

One nationally-known celebrity chef, whose name I’d prefer not to reveal, has a recipe for Double-Chocolate Pot Brownies that calls for just 4 grams (far less than an ounce) of marijuana to make 9 good-sized brownies. So, there would have been more than enough of Mr. Mao’s cannabis to go around.

However, while Delaware did recently decriminalize possession of marijuana for personal use, it is still illegal to consume it in public areas, including stores or restaurants. So, it’s unlikely that bakeries were the intended customers.

There’s yet another possibility worthy of consideration. Mao may be a secret agent for PETA.

As you may recall, when we last left that organization, it was unsuccessfully lobbying to change the name of one of our towns from Slaughter Beach to Sanctuary Beach, viewing the latter as a “kinder, positive, and more appropriate” designation.

But that was last year. PETA has since moved on to a campaign designed to convince people that placing live shellfish, like crabs and lobsters, in boiling water is an instance of inhumane, if that’s an appropriate word in this context, treatment of crustaceans.

Billboards to that effect were erected late last summer in Baltimore and along the Jersey Shore. I’m not sure why coastal Delaware was spared, perhaps PETA was stopped by memories of the threat of action by the Slaughter Beach Militia during its last incursion in the area.

Mike Berger

PETA’s campaign has not been totally ignored. The sympathetic owner of Charlotte’s Legendary Lobster Pound in Southwest Harbor, Maine, has proposed sedating her lobsters with marijuana smoke in their holding tanks before they are inserted into the stovetop lobster pots.

Perhaps one or more of our local seafood establishments ought to consider doing the same with their crabs.

In any case, as you will recall, this column began with a discussion of the weight of the illegal produce confiscated from one David Mao, late of San Francisco.

Therefore, it might be fitting to close with some other numbers from the year 2018 that ought to be of interest or concern to us. These would include:

1. The more than $3.2 million that Delaware collected in tolls during the five-day Thanksgiving holiday travel period. It’s good to know that I-95, and more significantly Route 1, are good for something. Although it does make one wonder, transponders aside, how many rolls of coins and stacks of bills a $3.2 million take produces.

2. The 39,000 customers who visited the Historic Lewes Farmers Market in during its 7-month season. This award-winning market goes far beyond the usual variety of farm produce to offer organic breads, duck eggs, lamb (meat, skin, wool, and yarn) and freshly shucked oysters. Incidentally, those bivalves, from my observation and consumption, do not seem to have been exposed to marijuana smoke before they met their demise.

3. The unanimous vote of approval by the Ocean View Town Council to hike the 2019 property tax in that municipality by 50 percent — and that’s not a typo. Apparently the driving force behind this draconian move is the desire of the township to diminish its dependence on revenue from unreliable transfer taxes. Most Ocean View residents agree that’s a good idea, they just don’t want the taxes transferred to them.